Productivity and technology tips to get you jacked!

A certain Ben Emson has blogged some great examples of putting BASH commands (Linux commands) to work. He calls them scripts, but really they’re recipes or snippets that you can include in your scripts, or just use directly on the command line.

A reader from Germany asked a question (in German) in the comments of one of our blog posts. We’re always glad to help here at CodeJacked, and luckily I can read a little bit of German. But it was a little bit too much for my limited ability. Luckily there are websites that can help. I turned to http://babelfish.yahoo.com/, copying her text and pasting it into Babelfish then selecting German to English translation. It has a hard time with expressions and slang terms, but it’s good enough to get the gist of what’s being said, plus it’s free so you can’t beat that!
So, if you’re not familiar with a language you can still get by with a little help from technology.

Feel free to use it to post comments on our website. It’ll let other readers understand what you’re saying and hopefully help them out too.

In a previous post, The ALIAS Command Saves Repetitive Typing, I promised an overview of the way Linux and Mac OS X (and Cygwin on Windows) all keep a history of the commands you issue, even between sessions. The command to display them is history. One use of the history command, for example, might be to explore for commands you frequently enter, thus giving you ideas about which ones ought to be turned into aliases.Continue Reading »

In yesterday’s post, The ALIAS Command Saves Repetitive Typing, I mentioned how alias definitions only stick around for as long as you are logged in. So, to make an alias act as if it is permanent, you have to re-define it every time you log in. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to do that automatically.

There’s a file in every user’s home folder called .bash_profile. Commands found in that file execute every time the user logs in.Continue Reading »

Unix-based operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X, have an alias command that saves time. If you find yourself typing in the same commands repeatedly, consider setting up an alias for them. For example, say you do a lot of work in a folder called “~/current_projects/annual_report”, such that you type this command a lot: